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• Just Like Football: USC 67, UCLA 46 #
• RT @Lileks: To recap: if you drink in the morning, you're an addict. If you drink in the morning near an athletic facility, you're a fan. #

USC’s mascot is a guy on horseback waving a sword. UCLA’s is a kid in a homemade bear suit.

— Jim Murray, Los Angeles Times, Nov. 25, 1973

Okay, not a great season for USC football but on the bright side, the men’s water polo team won back-to-back national championships with a 7-6 win over UCLA in today’s title match.

T-shirts are available!

It hasn’t been a great season for Pete Carroll and the Trojans — but they’re still three touchdowns better than UCLA.

FIGHT ON!

Steven B. Sample, president of the University of Southern California since 1991, announced on Nov. 2 that he will retire in August 2010.

Sample is widely credited with bringing about an institutional rise at USC that is unparalleled in American higher education.

— USC News

I’m so proud of what USC’s been able to accomplish academically under the leadership of Dr. Sample. When I went to USC in the pre-Sample era, the conventional wisdom in Southern California was that the rich kids went to USC and the smart kids went to UCLA.

(No one in my immediate family is or ever has been rich. I was able to attend USC on an academic scholarship, although it must be admitted that my wife and I both have rich but not overly bright cousins who also graduated as Trojans.)

Since 1991 though, SAT scores at USC have gone up more than 300 points. They passed up UCLA years ago and the gap continues to widen, much to the chagrin of Bruin alums.

So the way it works now is that the rich kids and the smart kids go to USC, and if you don’t fall into either one of those categories, you might be UCLA material.

Thank you, Steven B. Sample!

FIGHT ON!!!

Optimism is still full. It’s a full trough here at UCLA.

One thing that will keep us from it happening is if we start to believe it’s not on the right track. Those of us in the trenches, I expect everyone to fall in line with that. But the leader of the ship has to tell you it’s gonna land. That’s all I know how to do.

— Coach Rick Neuheisel

Some highlights from Rick Neuheisel’s Sunday night conference call:

It’s time for us to just keep fighting. I just believe it to be a journey that is necessary and we’re going to get there.

I’m not pressing the panic button, even though there are a lot of naysayers who don’t want me to.

I’m talking about the journey that it is. I don’t know when the end of it is. I know that where we’re going is an exciting place. That doesn’t mean people are going to be happy with how it’s arrived at.

LOL! FIGHT ON!

• RT @USCTrojans_com: Track. USC Sweeps Dual Meet For The First Time Ever http://cli.gs/3sDpya #
• RT @Lileks: Swine flu now goes from person to pig. http://bit.ly/xHgwj Finally, one for our team. In! Your! Snout! #

We were at Northwood High today for an academic planning session with my son and his counselor.

One of the things the counselor went over in the college prep handbook was a section on interview tips.

“At a private school like USC,” she told the boy, “you can schedule an interview with them if you think that will help your candidacy.”

“UCLA won’t let you do that,” I added. “They don’t want to talk to you.” I went through the application process at both schools so I know all about it.

“None of the UC schools will do an interview with you,” she said.

“It’s very impersonal,” I said, “like if the DMV ran a university.”

“It’s worse. At the DMV, eventually you’ll get to talk to someone.”

“By the way,” I said, pointing to a “Joey Ramone, 1951-2001″ poster on the wall, “do you think Joey Ramone is a good role model for the kids?”

“I like him,” she said, “and it’s my office.”

“You’re the best counselor ever,” I said.

Wednesday was national signing day for college football. Looks like UCLA got a good group of kids.

One of my Facebook friends, a UCLA grad, updated his status to say that he thinks UCLA will now rule the city in basketball AND football.

I posted a comment on his status: What about SAT scores?

And within minutes he had dropped me from his friend list, after sending me an angry email saying that USC is getting smart kids internationally and out of state while UCLA has to take California kids and besides that they’re manipulating the stats and blah blah blah . . .

To fully appreciate that, you need to know that traditionally the perception has been that the rich SoCal kids go to USC while the smart kids go to UCLA. In recent years though, USC has moved ahead in SAT scores, GPA, National Merit Scholars, etc., and continues to widen the gap.

So now the USC kids are richer AND smarter and the Bruins aren’t taking it well. Not at all.

FIGHT ON!

When I was growing up in Southern California, USC and UCLA both played home football games at the Coliseum. And every year, when the teams played each other, they both wore their home uniforms — the Trojans wore cardinal jerseys and the Bruins wore blue.

That tradition ended in 1982, when UCLA began playing home games at the Rose Bowl, because NCAA rule 1-4-3-a states that “the visiting team shall wear white jerseys.”

Twenty-six years later, the tradition returns.

Pete Carroll announced today that when the Trojans come out of the locker room at the Rose Bowl this Saturday, they’ll be wearing cardinal jerseys, in violation of NCAA rule 1-4-3-a.

They will then be assessed a penalty of one timeout per half.

Wait, what — they lose two timeouts?! OMG, they might NEED those timeouts! Oh sure, USC is heavily favored but it’s a RIVALRY game! Throw the record books out the window!! Anything can happen!!!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

God bless Pete Carroll! FIGHT ON!

OMG the UCLA bandwagon has crashed so hard, they’re still trying to identify the victims.

Karl Dorrell must be high-fiving people till his arm hurts.

FIGHT ON!

UCLA has hired Rick Neuheisel as its new football coach, replacing Karl Dorrell.

UCLA people love this guy. They’ve been blowing Neuheisel’s meat whistle ever since the announcement.

As a USC man, I say this: Great hire!

Neuheisel will fail for all of the reasons listed here. Excerpt: “Neuheisel’s one great genius turns out to be his ability to make people think he’s a genius.”

FIGHT ON!

According to the Los Angeles Times:

• Red Sanders decided to stay on as football coach at UCLA instead of pursuing the football coach/athletic director job at Texas A&M, a job recently vacated by Paul (Bear) Bryant. (Sanders would have a heart attack and die before the start of the 1958 football season anyway.)
• A father of three killed himself in front of his wife after losing his job on Christmas Eve.
• Silent-screen star Norma Talmadge died in Las Vegas. The Times gave her age as 60; according to IMDB, she was actually 62.

My son and I stopped by the USC Store at South Coast Plaza today. As you might expect, it was packed with people buying Christmas gifts, Rose Bowl gear and other branded merchandise.

I wonder what a UCLA Store would look like, if there were a UCLA Store. A handful of angry, miserable people milling about, checking out the Las Vegas Bowl runner-up merchandise.

FIGHT ON!

As I sat in Northwood Pizza last night with my son’s roller hockey team, watching the last few minutes of Florida State’s 44-27 drubbing of UCLA, I was reminded of chess grandmaster Aron Nimzowitsch, who once, after losing a match, climbed on a table and shouted

Why must I lose to this idiot?

FIGHT ON!

A friend of mine asked me the other day, “Do you think an organization really values a good manager?”

He asked me that because he’s moving from a position as lead developer on a high-visibility system (lots of job security) to a position managing the developers of that system.

And I had to say that in general, I think the answer is no, which is why you see managers generating a lot of useless paperwork to make their work visible: project plans, Gantt charts, spreadsheets, flowcharts . . .

Does this help? I haven’t found that it does, but it does provide an illusion of control and an acceptable way of failing: the manager can point to all the paperwork and say, “Well, I followed the accepted process right down the line, so the fact that we failed can’t be my fault!”

An analogy

Our local basketball team is coached by a guy named Phil Jackson. He’s not nearly as animated as most coaches . . . he spends most of each game sitting quietly in his chair on the sidelines, even when things seem to be falling apart for the team.

When things aren’t going well, he gets a lot of criticism for this:

They lost the game and he didn’t do anything!

I think this is why most coaches spend the whole game jumping up and down, yelling, tearing their hair out . . . they want to be seen as having done something.

Even if the team loses, people say, “Boy, he really coached his ass off.”

A second analogy

I grew up in Southern California during the years that John Wooden was coaching the UCLA basketball team. Like Phil Jackson, Wooden was distinctly non-animated during games.

He sat on the sidelines holding a rolled-up program in his hand, rarely called time-outs . . . his teams won 10 national championships and he hardly even got out of his chair the whole time.

He believed that the real work was done behind the scenes — preparation, attention to detail. Bill Walton summed up Wooden’s coaching style like this:

Don’t confuse activity with achievement.

Summary

Managing a software project is not a process of managing dependencies . . . it’s more a process of managing uncertainty, complexity and change. That’s why the Gantt charts and flowcharts don’t help, but they do allow the manager to show that he did something.

A well-managed team should have a clear, common vision, a robust flow of ideas, a reputation for high-quality work . . . but it may not be obvious to an observer what role, if any, the manager had in developing these qualities, because a lot of what a good manager does is not visible . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

My son is watching SportsCenter in the other room . . .

He says, “UCLA hired a new coach: Carlos Burrell!”

By which I think he means Karl Dorrell.

That is a great, great hire.

I say that as a USC grad who was sorry to see Bob Toledo go. They might never beat the Trojans again . . .